Ursuline College Rust Belt Humanities Lab Reframes Northeast Ohio’s Future

Reframing a narrative once shrouded in decay and decline into a story with a future adorned in positivity and prosperity is never an easy task. But that’s exactly what the academics at Ursuline College’s Rust Belt Humanities Lab are doing.

For our area, it’s long overdue. Northeast Ohio has been the subject of jokes — or stories wrapped in emptiness, decay and decline. But really, it’s been a center for arts and literature ­— and environmental awareness — to name but a few of the civic and cultural successes of our region. 

Drs. Katharine Trostel and Valentino Zullo are co-directors of the Rust Belt Humanities Lab at Ursuline College.

“One of the things we started realizing as we were talking to our students is that most of our nursing students stay in Northeast Ohio to launch their careers, but many see this as a place to leave or escape from,” says Trostel. “So, we began to think about how we might structure our humanities curriculum to help them think about futures ­— about the important events that surround the Rust Belt. As we started piecing all the parts together, we began realizing that there is no formal academic study of our region.”

“Our ultimate goal is to see how we can use the study of humanities to activate our city in impactful and useful ways,” adds Zullo. “If we can help students rethink and re-imagine the possibilities here, we can create a much stronger link to this region.”

This not only changes students’ perception of our region, but also helps to link and retain graduates in our area. 

So, why the need for change?

“Valentino came up with a cartooning exercise that challenged students to draw their identity,” says Trostel. “They really had no idea of what ‘Midwest’ means. When we gave students that key word, many drew cacti and cowboys. But when we gave them the term ‘Rust Belt’ or ‘Cleveland,’ they drew McDonald’s or something closed, or just drew nothing.”

“Students were not linking our past with watershed moments in political history,” says Zullo. “A lot of the civil rights movements were defined right here, from local speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Carl Stokes, who was the first African American mayor of a major U.S. city.”

And, of course, there is the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency and the environmental movement that grew out of the Cuyahoga River catching fire. 

“Those stories are a great use of history, which allow students to think about the future,” says Zullo. “But more importantly, we want to create projects to help students think about future possibilities and not just about Northeast Ohio as a place for loss.”

The Rust Belt Humanities Lab offers an opportunity to invest in the civic fabric and infrastructure of our collective home. 

“It uses Cleveland and the Rust Belt area as a laboratory of democracy and civic engagement,” adds Zullo. “Some of the projects we are involved with are a rethinking of humanities in our city.”

Last month, the Rust Belt Humanities Lab held its third annual Rust Belt Symposium, featuring a poetry reading by Anisfield-Wolf Award-Winning Author Janice N. Harrington; a cooking demonstration from Alexis Nikole Nelson (Black Forager); and a natural dye workshop with Maggie Lathum Studio and Rust Belt Fibershed. 

Presenters included: Andrew Aydin, coauthor of the MARCH series, Run, Register and Taste of Justice; Ben Smith of Cleveland’s Spice-Cream Truck, recording local community members’ stories; the founding team of the nonprofit Midstory, a thinkhub creating a positive narrative of the Midwest with the hopes of driving investment and population to post-industrial areas; and the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive team, which preserves and makes accessible the writing of the post-Civil War author (1858-1932) on race, identity, violence, class and familial and economic relations.